Scott Cooper, Robert Duvall, Rob Carliner, Judy Cairo, T Bone Burnett

Credits

DIRECTOR/WRITER Scott Cooper
PRODUCERS Scott Cooper, Robert Duvall, Rob Carliner, Judy Cairo, T Bone Burnett

Biography

Scott Cooper (writer/director)

Cooper’s training as an actor began at the famed Lee Strasberg Institute in New York City. He has collaborated with his mentor, Robert Duvall, on four pictures including the upcoming Sony Pictures Classics release, Get Low, which also stars Bill Murray and Sissy Spacek; AMC’s Emmy and Golden Globe Award-winning Broken Trail, directed by Walter Hill; and the Warner Bros. Civil War epic, Gods and Generals. Crazy Heart marks Cooper’s first foray behind the camera as both writer and director.

Originally from Virginia, Cooper now resides in Los Angeles with his wife, Jocelyne, and his daughters, Ava and Stella.

Robert Duvall (producer/'Wayne')

Veteran actor Robert Duvall received his first Academy Award nomination as Best Supporting Actor for his role as Corleone Family legal advisor Tom Hagen in The Godfather. In 1979, Duvall earned a second Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actor for his role as the Custer-like Kilgore in Apocalypse Now. The next year, he drew yet another Academy Award nomination, this time for Best Actor as the macho Marine pilot Bull Meechum in The Great Santini. He was honored with the Academy Award as Best Actor for the 1983 release Tender Mercies. He was nominated again for The Apostle (a film he wrote and directed), won a Golden Globe for Stalin and received a Globe nomination as well as his sixth Oscar nomination for A Civil Action. 

Duvall made his screen debut in To Kill A Mockingbird. In the now-classic motion picture, Duvall played the pivotal role of the mysterious,misunderstood Boo Radley. His impressive roster of additional feature film credits also includes The Chase, Countdown, The Detective, Bullitt, The Rain People True Grit, M*A*S*H, THX 1138, The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid, Joe Kidd, The Conversation, The Godfather Part II, The Eagle Has Landed, The Killer Elite, Network, The Seven Per-Cent Solution, True Confessions, The Pursuit of D.B. Cooper, The Natural, Let's Get Harry, Days of Thunder, Colors, Rambling Rose, Falling Down, Geronimo, Wrestling Earnest Hemmingway, The Paper, The Scarlett LEtter, Phenomenon, The Sixth Day, John Q, Deep Impact, Gone In 60 Seconds, Gods and Generals, Open Range, Seconhand Lions, Kicking and Screaming, Lucky You, and We Own the Night. Last year, he appeared in the holiday blockbuster Four Christmases. 

Duvall formed Butchers Run Films so that he could become more actively involved in all aspects of film and television development and production. In June of 2006, its miniseries, Broken Trail, aired on AMC to 10million viewers.  Broken Trail garnered 16 Emmy nominations as well as 3 Golden Globe nominations, and a Directors Guild Award.  The companys first co-production, A Family Thing in which Duvall co-stars, earned a Humanitas Award. He executive produced the TNT Original The Man Who Captured Eichmann in which Duvall portrayed the chillingly remorseless Nazi bureaucrat, Adolph Eichmann. In the beginning of 2001, he went to Argentina to direct, write, produce, and star in Assasination Tango.   He can also be seen in the post-apocalyptic feature The Road with Viggo Mortensen.

Rob Carliner (producer)

Before arriving in Hollywood, the future Emmy and Independent Spirit Award-winning producer, Rob Carliner, attended Princeton and the University of Michigan as a Russian Studies major, an education which came in handy during his first job as director Ivan Passer’s interpreter during the acclaimed HBO telefilm Stalin.  While working on the film he met its star, Robert Duvall, who offered him a job at his then new production company based at Sony, Butcher’s Run Films.  Carliner started as Duvall’s story editor then quickly advanced to development executive.  Two years later, in 1995, the Oscar-winning actor Duvall called to say his producer was leaving the company and offered Carliner the reigns.  At 25, Carliner suddenly found himself heading a production company for one of the industry’s most esteemed performers.  In his new position at Butchers Run, Carliner immediately entered pre-production on the
TNT telefilm, The Man Who Captured Eichmann, which was nominated for two Emmy Awards.  As co-producer, Carliner developed the material and supervised all aspects of the production while on location in Argentina for the two-month shoot.

After Carliner’s successful producing debut, Duvall entrusted him to produce his long-time personal endeavor, The Apostle.  Duvall financed and directed his script, which he also starred in along with Billy Bob Thornton, Miranda Richardson, and Farrah Fawcett, while Carliner oversaw the $4 million production.  Upon completion in September 1997, Carliner and Duvall took The Apostle to the Toronto International Film Festival.  A bidding war ensued among several distribution companies.  October Films won, paying $5 million for the worldwide rights, a record for any film sold at that prestigious festival/film market.  The Apostle made over $20 million in domestic box office grosses and surpassed the $20 million mark in home video rentals. In addition to receiving an Academy Award Nomination (Best Actor for Duvall), The Apostle was nominated for six Independent Spirit Awards - the most of any film in ’97.  Carliner took home the award for Best Picture, while Duvall earned Best Actor and Best Director statues.  Among the numerous accolades, including an Un Certain Regard screening at the
Cannes International Film Festival and a private screening for President Bill Clinton at The White House, The Apostle was named to over seventy-five critics’ “Top 10” film lists for 1997,
including Janet Maslin of The  New York Times and Kenneth Turan of The Los Angeles Times.

In 2001, Carliner produced Assasination Tango, a script Duvall wrote, starred in and directed.  The story tracks an aging hit man in Brooklyn who travels to Buenos Aires to assassinate a general.  Carliner worked closely with the film’s executive producer, Francis Ford Coppola, on the Argentina-based production which co-starred Ruben Blades and Kathy Baker. 
Assasination Tango premiered at the 2002 Toronto International Film Festival (Carliner’s third film to receive its premiere there) and was released by MGM/UA in March of 2003. In 2005, Carliner joined Duvall as executive producer on AMC’s “Broken Trail,” a 4-hour Western mini-series starring Duvall and Thomas Haden Church (Sideways).  Directed by Walter Hill (48 Hours, Deadwood), the two-part epic follows a veteran cowboy and his nephew as they drive five hundred horses from Oregon to Wyoming, their trail crossing with five enslaved Chinese girls. Broken Trail premiered on AMC in June 2006, preceded by a private screening at The White House for President Bush (Carliner’s second screening there).  In addition, Broken Trail was the most-watched broadcast on cable that year and the second-most watched cable movie of all time, generating close to 10 million viewers.  Carliner also received his first ever Emmy Award in 2007 for Best Miniseries, along with the picture’s sixteen other Emmy nominations.

Judy Cairo (producer)

Judy Cairo’s films have garnered a Golden Globe®, the George Foster Peabody, the Christopher Award, IPA Satellite Awards and numerous Emmy nominations.  Biopics and films about music pepper her body of work as a producer, among them Elvis, the four-hour mini-series with three Golden Globe® nominations and a win for Jonathan Rhys Meyers; Gleason, the story of comedian and actor Jackie Gleason; and The Boy King, the story of Martin Luther King, Jr. as a child, for which Judy worked closely with Coretta Scott King and Christine King Farris, Martin’s sister, to portray accurately and emotionally the childhood influences which shaped Dr. King’s life.  The film was Cairo’s first, and won the George Foster Peabody.  She’s currently developing Ella, a biopic on the legendary “First Lady of Song” Ella Fitzgerald, and a drama based on the life of the “James Dean of Jazz,” Chet Baker, among other projects in a broad slate at Informant Media. Earlier in her career, Cairo honed her producing skills out in the field with a portable, 50-pound video recorder slung across her shoulder, trekking across the country and the world – Africa, China, Russia, Europe – producing and writing documentaries which examined life around the world: the famine in Burkina Faso, the prêt a porter in Paris, the everyday life of a Communist party member and factory worker in the Republic of Georgia.  “I’m driven to find stories that will teach me something,” she comments. Cairo founded Informant Media, which develops, finances, and produces independent feature films, with partners Michael A. Simpson and Eric Brenner.  Crazy Heart is Informant’s first offering.  

Cairo was raised in the South (like Bad Blake), in a small town (like Jean Craddock) and graduated from University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

T Bone Burnett (producer)

T Bone Burnett was born Joseph Henry Burnett in St. Louis, Missouri, and grew up in Fort Worth, Texas, where he first made records in 1965, producing Texas blues, country, and rock & roll bands and, occasionally, himself. In the early 1970s, he relocated to Los Angeles, where he still lives and works as a producer and recording artist. In 1975, he toured with Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder Review tour before forming his own group, the Alpha Band, with other musicians from the tour. Burnett returned to recording solo in the late 1970s and has gone on to record numerous critically acclaimed albums--including 1992's Grammy nominated Criminal Under My Own Hat-- under his own name. He has written music for two Sam Shepard plays—Tooth Of Crime (Second Dance) and The Late Henry Moss -- and composed music for a production of Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage and Her Children by Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre Company.

A prolific and versatile producer, T Bone Burnett has helmed highly successful recordings for Elvis Costello, Roy Orbison, Tony Bennett, k.d. lang, Alison Krauss, Counting Crows, the Wallflowers, Sam Phillips, Gillian Welch, and Ralph Stanley among numerous others. Burnett was musical director for the concert film, Roy Orbison and Friends: Black and White Night, which featured Orbison and an all-star band of Bruce Springsteen, Elvis Costello, Tom Waits, Bonnie Raitt, Burnett, and many others.  In 2001, he served as Composer and Music Producer for the Coen Brothers' film O Brother Where Art Thou?, scoring the film and producing a soundtrack of "old-timey" American music performed by musicians relatively unknown to the public at large. That soundtrack album became nothing less than a cultural phenomenon, selling nearly 9 million copies and dominating the Billboard album chart for more than a year. In 2002, Burnett took home four Grammy Awards: Producer, Album of the Year for O Brother Where Art Thou?; Producer, Best Traditional Folk Album for Down From The Mountain; Producer, Best Compilation Soundtrack Album For A Motion Picture, Television Or Other Visual Media for O Brother Where Art Thou?; and Producer of the Year for his work on the above projects and Sam Phillips' Fan Dance.

He was Executive Producer, along with the Coen Brothers, of the Down From the Mountain concert documentary, filmed at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville in 2000. The success of that concert and film, along with the phenomenal success of the O Brother soundtrack, led to T Bone and the Coen Brothers producing two highly-successful concert tours featuring the music, musicians and spirit of O Brother Where Art Thou?, Down From the Mountain in 2002 and The Great High Mountain in 2003.  Burnett and the Coen Brothers joined forces again in 2002 to form DMZ Records, a joint venture with Columbia Records, and produced the new label's inaugural releases: a new album by the legendary bluegrass musician Ralph Stanley and the Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood soundtrack. DMZ has since released several critically-acclaimed soundtrack albums, produced or executive-produced by Burnett, including Cold Mountain (2003), A Mighty Wind (2003),  Crossing Jordan (2003), and The Ladykillers (2004), a personal favorite of T Bone's which reunited him with the Coen Brothers on a film for the first time since O Brother Where Art Thou?  One of his songs for Cold Mountain, "The Scarlet Tide," co-written with Elvis Costello and sung by Alison Krauss, was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Song and won the BAFTA (British Academy of Film and Television Arts) Anthony Asquith Award for Film Music.  He earned a fifth Grammy for his production on 2003's A Wonderful World album by Tony Bennett and k.d. lang. He also wrote the score and several songs for the Wim Wenders and Sam Shepard film, Don't Come Knocking, collaborating with Bono and Andrea Corrs and Cassandra Wilson, which was released in the spring of 2006.  He recently served as Executive Music Producer for the highly-acclaimed Johnny Cash biopic, Walk the Line, produced the film's RIAA gold-certified soundtrack album and composed its score. Burnett's work on that film earned him another BAFTA nomination in 2006.